In the assassin's mind

Material Objects (MO) 124 and 125 are now just piles of paper gathering dust in a court vault. But they helped enlist an army of fighters, and assassins, for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. 'Satanic Force', two large volumes of Tiger propaganda seized by CBI investigators soon after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi gives an insight into the harsh indoctrination that LTTE cadres were put through.

"There were more than 1,000 affidavits, mostly in Tamil, with names and addresses, narrations of cases of women raped and killed by the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), of men tortured and butchered. It would make anyone shed tears," says K Ragothaman, the CBI's chief investigating officer who interrogated the three Rajiv assassins, Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan, for more than a month.

Full report here Times of India

Bharati's legacy

Long after Subramanya Bharati's death, his poetic legacy continued to be contested by the eminent literary personalities of the time. A look at the debate.

When Bharati passed away on September 11, 1921, The Hindu carried a tribute to Bharati from S. Satyamurthi: “Had he been born in England he would have been the poet laureate and been adored by his race. Had he born in any other free country, he would have risen to such heights of eminence that he would have lived longer and enriched his language and race more than he was able to do here. Had he born even in Bengal, he would have been a Rabindranath Tagore. Those who know his poems will know I am indulging in no exaggeration. But born in India and in Tamil India Subramania Bharati had to spend the best part of an all too short life an exile from those who were near and dear to him. No wonder that he pined and suffered and has gone to a premature grave. So long however as the Tamil language lives and there is a spark of patriotism in Tamil India, Subramania Bharati's songs will live.”

There were very few at the funeral, and V. Chakkarai Chettiar, Krishnswamy Sharma and Ramachandra Aiyar spoke in Tamil while Surendranath Arya paid tributes in Telugu. The pyre was lit by Harihara Sharma, a relative and while the mortal remains were consumed, the fire he lit in the minds of the people continued to glow.

However, due recognition to Bharati came much later, but even then with such debates that made one feel that Tamil India had not remembered Bharati well enough!

Full report here Hindu

“Tholkappiam preceded Rig Veda”

Mr. Guna, a research Scholar has released his Tamil book titled Tholkaappiyaththin Kaalam ( The Period of Tholkappiam)

Guna is an intellect well known to the Tamil enthusiasts. He relentlessly studies and propagate the antiquity of Tamil Language, Literature, Race and Culture. By this way he uncovers the truth deliberately hidden by the conspirators against Tamil Language.

His book Tholkaappiyaththin Kaalam was released in Santhome Chennai amidst much funfare on 13.08.2011. The function was lively with performances of Paraiyaattam, Chakkaikkuchchi aattam, Street play etc well organized by Thamizhar kalam.

Dr. David Prabhakar has released an introduction on this book which is translated and produced below:

Full report here Truthdive

Pulp fiction is back!

It's time to rewind to regional pulp fiction as over-the-top heroes, villains and outlandish plots make for a quickie read. Anuradha Varma reports

Lyricist and scriptwriter Javed Akhtar credits reading Ibne Safi's novels for helping him creating eternal celluloid villains like Gabbar Singh and Mogambo. Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap grew up wanting to be either Amitabh Bachchan or writer Surender Mohan Pathak. Actress Gul Panag even invited her favourite novelist Pathak to the premiere of her film Rann.

Besides Bengali detectives Feluda and Byomkesh Bakshi, Hindi, Urdu and Tamil pulp fiction heroes can keep many readers up at night turning pages of their slim detective novels. "Pocket books" or novellas, these became popular at book stalls at railway stations over 50 years ago.

Publishing houses are now giving the books fresh airing. Westland, along with Blaft, has published four translations of Ibne Safi's Jasusi Duniya series. Ibne Safi, the pen name of Asrar Ahmad, was once described as "the only original writer in the subcontinent" by Agatha Christie and wrote 125 novels in his lifetime.

Full report here Times of India 

Long-listed for literary award

Salma had one regret as a writer. Though she arrived on the Tamil literary scene with her poems, powerfully expressing the pain of sufferings of women treated as sexual objects by men, she feels that her debut novel ‘Irandam Jaamangalin Kathai' was “deliberately ignored.”

But, an English translation by Laksmi Holmstrom titled ‘The Hour Past Midnight' did the magic. The novel is now in the long list of the first DSC Prize for South Asian Literature along with the works of well-known writers such as Amit Chaudhuri and Upamanyu Chatterjee. The prize, whose long-list has 14 books, carries a cash award of $50,000.

“I am happy that my novel is getting world-wide attention,” said Salma. The novel narrated hitherto unknown world of Muslim women in a male-dominated society, besides capturing their aspirations in the absence of any link with women outside their world. “It is the politics in the literary world that ensured that the novel did not get its due,” said Salma, who was then the president of a panchayat in Tiruchi. She took a plunge into politics in 2004 by joining the DMK. She was also fielded as the party candidate in Marungapuri Assembly constituency, but failed to win the election. The government later appointed her chairperson of the Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Board.

Full report here Hindu

Loss of a crest jewel

Eminent Tamil short story writer Chudamani Raghavan's passing is a great loss to the Indian literary scene. C.S. Lakshmi, a close associate and Tamil scholar, reflects on their relationship which grew from a love for life and literature…

She was not unused to physical pain. She had endured a lot in her life and yet when I saw her emaciated body put on a ventilator, I felt she did not deserve this final indignity of clinical imprisonment in an intensive care unit. Sometimes our love for a person makes us do what is advised by doctors as best for them and there is no way this dilemma can be resolved. And I am sure she understood the love and affection that lay beneath these decisions.

She was that kind of a person. In this instance also she surrendered herself to whatever medical treatment was given to her with no complaints. When I bent down and called out her name on the day when she was semi-conscious, she opened those soulful eyes of hers and they slowly filled with tears. I knew the tears were for me; for the deep friendship we shared. It was her way of saying, “Good bye, take care and keep writing.” At least that is what I would like to think for whenever we met, even when she was ill or otherwise busy, she would always ask me what I was writing. She belonged to that era of writers who had great grace and warmth for fellow-writers. My friend, the well-known Tamil writer R. Chudamani, whom I have known for the last forty-five years, breathed her last in the early morning hours of September 13. Come January she would have been eighty.

Full report here Hindu

The write stuff

Rejecting the Kalaimamani award for its taking-the-artiste-for-granted impersonality, Indira Parthasarathy (16 novels, 10 plays, anthologies of short stories, essays) is the recipient of national recognition including the Saraswati Samman, and the only Tamil writer to be given awards by both Sahitya and Sangeet Natak Akademis. Drawing from his life in hometown Kumbakonam, New Delhi, Warsaw and the U.S., Parthasarathy has established himself as a voice of many tones, adding dimensions to character interplay with the resonance of political issues. Here he reflects on experiences shaping his growth as a writer.

When did you realise you were a writer?
A natural process beginning with voracious reading in childhood. In our Vaishnavite home, the poetry of the Alwars was part of daily ritual. But, I don't know what made me read Balzac and Charles Lamb, or the 2,000-page “Missing Links” about ancient Egypt by Vaduvur Doraiswami Iyengar. The same man who wrote ‘pennythrillers' and ‘shillingshockers' that I read aloud to my grandmother, earning one anna for a book.

I gazed at writers Ku Rajagopalan, Karichan Kunju and Thi Janakiraman (my English teacher) as if they were filmstars… (smiling) I began with verse, but had the wisdom to stop when I knew it was not poetry.

You were fascinated by Shelley?
There's something about Shelley that incites you. I imagined I was a great revolutionary, rebelling against agraharam orthodoxy. In college, I became a member of the Communist party, and was suspended briefly for instigating student agitation.

Full interview here Hindu

Send teachers abroad to teach Tamil: VIT chancellor

Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) University Chancellor G. Viswanathan said on Monday, Sep 13 that Tamil teachers should be sent to foreign countries for teaching Tamil to children of Non-Resident Indian Tamil families and who did not get the opportunity to learn Tamil because of parents speaking in English.

The Chancellor spoke while presiding over a function organized jointly by the VIT University as the VGP World Tamil Sangam gifted the varsity's E.V.R. Periyar Library a massive Thirukkural book, consisting of poems by the famous Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar written almost 2000 years ago.

The 1.25 tonnes weighing book that is six feet high and three feet wide contains around 1330 two line verses by the poet.

Full report here India Edunews

Under the boot

Growing up in the 1980s in small town coastal Andhra Pradesh, I often played cricket with children who had conspicuous Tamil names. I didn't know much about them except that they all loved cricket and lived in a humble 'Lanka colony'. Later I realised that they were Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka.

After reading Shobasakthi's Traitor, I hoped that their stories weren't remotely similar to that of the book's protagonist, Nesakumaran. The story begins and ends in an unknown European city where he's taken refuge. But the civil war that began in 1980s Sri Lanka, with the minority ethnic Tamils fighting for a separate state, gives the story it's flesh and blood. Literally.

It is written as a memoir where the personal and the political and the minute details and the big picture merge. It is about Nesakumaran's journey out of the tiny Palmyra Palm Island through various army camps, interrogation chambers and a nightmare of brutalities with its Shawshank Redemption-like moments. Anushiya Ramaswamy has done a brilliant job of translation.

Full report here Hindustan Times

‘Bharati’s writing in English was superior'

“Of all the languages I know, I have seen none beautiful as Tamil”, Mahakavi Subramanya Bharati said. Such lines are dime a dozen these days, but it is especially heartening to hear such a salutation to Tamil from Bharati, says E Ramamurthi.

“Bharati knew six Indian and seven foreign languages. A salutation that comes from a man who knows 13 languages is an educated and cultured statement, not mere rhetoric”, says Ramamurthi, better known as ‘Bharati Kavalar’ or ‘The Protector of Bharati’, a title given to him by poet Bharatidasan in 1964.

In the course of his research, Bharati Kavalar found a line in praise of the firebrand poet, which many would find hard to digest today. “Rajaji said Bharati’s writing in English was superior to his Tamil works. Will you believe it?” says Ramamurthi with a twinkle in his eye. He says Bharati’s works existed in five different languages. Apart from his prolific writing in Tamil and English, he wrote three poems in Sanskrit, translated seven short stories of Rabindranath Tagore from Bengali and also translated a number of French works along with contemporary VVS Aiyar.

Full report here New Indian Express

Best place to read Hamlet

No escapist haven, it is still an excellent place to seek seclusion. The statue of Tamil poet Subramania Bharathi (circa 1987) in a little plaza, off Maharshi Raman Marg, near Khan Market, offers the best urban evening in Delhi. As the sky turns crimson-blue, the bronze figure recedes into an illusionary dimness.

You feel for all those beautiful Tamil poems that you will never read because you don’t understand the language. The small plaza looks to the bungalows of Lodhi Estate. Behind is Kaka Nagar colony. The ground is paved with stone slabs. On two sides are weedy gardens with trimmed hedges. Both are raised on a platform, reached by a set of three steps. A triangle-shaped bushy plot is landscaped in front of the statue.

On rare evenings, there will be old men, sitting on the steps, discussing the state of the world. Once we saw a couple of boys doing acrobatics. Most likely you will be the only one there. But the plaza’s solitude is transient. You will never be able to feel completely alone for more than a few seconds.

Full report here Hindustan Times 

Keeping them hooked to books

In a few weeks, many underprivileged children in the state will hold a book that was given to them by someone like us in Chennai, who had a few books to spare. Giving them this opportunity is the ‘Aviva Great Wall of Education’ presented by The Hindu, a book donation drive that targeted at children at the elementary school level. And who better than authors of children’s books to tell us what would keep little minds interested?

Gita Wolf who has authored more than 15 books for children, feels that books should be fun and not didactic. “An interesting narrative with a lot of pictures thrown in is the perfect blend that makes children respond positively,” she says.

Anushka Ravishakar, who is another popular children’s books author feels that children deserve to hold books that look good and are nicely produced. “An encyclopedia for instance is something that would capture the child’s mind simply because it is most often very beautifully done and has a lot interesting information flanked by big pictures,” she says.

Full report here Hindu

Nallapillai's version of Mahabharata

Yet another instance of silent service to the Tamil language comes from Srinivasan, who has bravely undertaken the task of bringing out a standard edition of the Mahabharata (Tamil) written by Nallapillai in the 19th century. This proves once again that Indian culture is one and indivisible and any talk of an Aryan-Dravidian divide is disruptive. The second part of the work — the first appeared three years ago — covers Santhi, Anusasana, Asramavasa, Mausala, Mahaprasthanika and Swargarohana Parvas. Excellently produced, the book is a joy to handle for the lover of Tamil literature.

The detailed introduction gives us an idea of how Srinivasan has mastered the available Mahabharata literature in Tamil and his discovery of a Tamil version of Jaimini Bharatha by Muhammad Annavi, who is also the author of Bharata Ammanai. What is passed off briefly as the guardianship by Krishna, who came in his “subtle form as Dharma” to robe Draupadi, is embellished by Tamil writers like Villipputturar and Nallapillai to project the incarnational aspect of the Prince of Dwaraka. He has also made a reference to the work of Manalur Ramanujachariar, who spent his life and assets for bringing out the Tamil version of the Mahabharata.

Full report here Hindu

Nallapillai's version of Mahabharata

Yet another instance of silent service to the Tamil language comes from Srinivasan, who has bravely undertaken the task of bringing out a standard edition of the Mahabharata (Tamil) written by Nallapillai in the 19th century. This proves once again that Indian culture is one and indivisible and any talk of an Aryan-Dravidian divide is disruptive. The second part of the work — the first appeared three years ago — covers Santhi, Anusasana, Asramavasa, Mausala, Mahaprasthanika and Swargarohana Parvas. Excellently produced, the book is a joy to handle for the lover of Tamil literature.

The detailed introduction gives us an idea of how Srinivasan has mastered the available Mahabharata literature in Tamil and his discovery of a Tamil version of Jaimini Bharatha by Muhammad Annavi, who is also the author of Bharata Ammanai. What is passed off briefly as the guardianship by Krishna, who came in his “subtle form as Dharma” to robe Draupadi, is embellished by Tamil writers like Villipputturar and Nallapillai to project the incarnational aspect of the Prince of Dwaraka. He has also made a reference to the work of Manalur Ramanujachariar, who spent his life and assets for bringing out the Tamil version of the Mahabharata.

Full report here Hindu

Living in linguistic entropy

The building guard rings my doorbell, armed with dire news: “Aapka cable cut karne ko ayaa hai.” Cable? But I have Tata Sky. I run down to investigate only to be confronted by an irate young man in khaki. “No cable! Electric, electric,” he growls, impatient at our misapprehension. We begin to argue, I in Tamil, he in Kannada, our voices rising in frustration, as the guard tries to make peace in Hindi. What I remember most clearly is the BESCOM fellow’s contempt for my inability to speak his language – a deficiency that damns me as an outsider.

Language is a marker of identity, but also difference, a truism that is easy to forget in the cosmopolitan confines of Bangalore. This is a multi-ethnic, multilingual city, more so over the past twenty years thanks to the IT boom. In ‘new’ Bangalore, Manipuri beauticians, Malayali nurses, Punjabi housewives, Tamil maids, and Andhra businessmen live cheek by jowl, expanding each other’s linguistic horizons. The Gujarati businessman at the vet’s clinic chats in Kannada with the assistant, drumming up some broken Tamil as he makes small talk with me. My maid, who arrived in the city as a young illiterate woman from Dharmapuri, has since added three languages – Kannada, Hindi, and English – to her skill set. “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse,” averred the Spanish Emperor Charles V. The youngest generation of Bangaloreans are no less talented. “My child already speaks four languages,” is the boast I hear most often from other parents. Too bad I can’t say the same about mine.

Full report here Bangalore Mirror

Writers who have stood the test of time

Masti Venkatesa Iyengar, a Tamil who wrote in Kannada, lived up to a hundred years. Around Independence, anyone crossing 50 was considered old and his disappearance wasn’t considered unnatural. A whole range of Tamil writers from Pudumaipittan to Ku Pa Rajagopalan to T Janakiraman passed away well before they could touch 60. The terms immortality and belonging to posterity, etc, are frequently bandied about terms in writing about the contemporary writing scene. One only has to look into a 10-year-old ‘Who’s Who’ of writers to realise how short is the impact of a writer. They say of a film director that he is as good as his last film. The same holds good for the writer also.

The children and grand-children of Dr (Indira) R Parthasarathy celebrated his 80th birthday on July 10. Many friends and well-wishers gathered on the occasion to greet him a long and active life. When one reflects about his beginnings and growing up as a writer, one will be justifiably amazed. Parthasarathy studied Tamil and English at the post-graduate level. As an academic, he should have been wary of an ‘aberration’ called modern writing. But despite teaching classical Tamil, he took to contemporary writing; first short stories; a little later, novels and from 1970 onwards he also began writing plays. Today, Parthasarathy is as famous for his prose fiction as he is for his plays. He is the only Indian writer to have been honoured by both the Sahitya Akademi and the Sangeet Natak Akademi.

Full report here New Indian Express

Commemorative stamp on Jeeva released

A commemorative stamp featuring freedom fighter and communist leader P. Jeevanandham, known as Jeeva, was released on Saturday.

“He was a leader who knew the mind of the people and through his speeches, he ensured that people voted against the governments,” recalled CPI state secretary D. Pandian in his address in the function.

Mr Pandian, a close associate of Jeeva in the last 11 years of his life, said his self-denial and patriotism prompted Mahatma Gandhi to call him the “asset of the nation.”

“Jeeva was also a brilliant orator and exponent of Tamil literature,” he said recalling how the Kamban Kazhagam in Karaikudi allowed him to speak without setting any time frame.

CPI national council secretary D. Raja pointed out how Jeeva had assimilated the principles of Marxism and explained them to the layman through simple and powerful songs.

Full report here Hindu

The ills of Tamil

The author of this rather provocatively titled slim book, an ornithologist by profession and training, is clear about his objective: to draw attention to some of the widely prevalent mistakes in spoken and written Tamil so that the Tamil scholars would join hands in correcting them

Grubh, who has Tamil as his mother tongue, says that, in spite of it being a phonetic language, Tamil has too many discrepancies in pronunciation, and goes on to identify the wrong pronunciation of vowels.

He believes that besides causing confusion in the minds of young learners, the discrepancies make it difficult for foreigners to study the language.

“English is not accessible even to Englishmen” and “…the English have no respect for their language” — George Bernard Shaw in the Preface to Pygmalion, a satire on English language. He says the phonetics varies from street to street in London.

Thousands of dialects exist in the world, and India has several hundreds. Linguists are of the view that the spoken form of the language, or tongue language, developed over a period of more than 5,000 years, and the written form evolved only about 3,000 years ago. The two forms cannot be synchronised fully.

Full report here Hindu

Deceptively simple, yet great poetic sensitivity

Christopher Caudwell, in his Illusion and Reality, a Marxist dissertation on literature, says that while the qualities of great novels can survive translation, those of poetry cannot. The reason is not far to seek. Poetry is basically a style of thinking of the creative artist, for whom the manner of conveying what he wants to say is intimately connected with the genius of the language in which he writes. The genius of the language is largely determined by the historical, social, and cultural factors that go to shape it.

Any up and coming, conscientious modern Tamil poet has to contend with the initial embarrassment of being bamboozled by a long, rich literary antiquity. He not only needs to be suitably equipped for being a worthy follower of such a long tradition but must also be talented enough to violate or modify the rules of prosody without offending the soul-rhythm and nuances of the language.

Sirpi Balasubramaniam, one of the major voices in contemporary Tamil poetry, is well-steeped in the Tamil literary tradition, as an academic scholar, who has professed this language for nearly four decades. His poems are deceptively simple and deal with a variety of themes with great poetic sensitivity.

Full report here Hindu

Periyar bonanza: exhilarating reading

Scholars engaged in the study of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy never had it so good. As many as three editions of the collected writings and speeches of Periyar (1879-1973) are now available. V. Anaimuthu's path-breaking work, first published in 1974, was reissued in a vastly expanded edition earlier this year. The 27 volumes brought out by Periyar Dravidar Kazhagam, held up by copyright litigation, were also released soon thereafter. Periyar Kalanjiyam, under review, was conceived way back in 1983 as the definitive edition of the complete works of Periyar. First published thematically, it has now been restructured chronologically. The 11 volumes cover the period 1925-30 of Kudiarasu, the weekly founded and edited by Periyar. (More volumes have since appeared).

Radical thinker
Periyar's public life covered a long span, which virtually coincided with the making of modern Tamil Nadu. He was a self-taught thinker, and his views were radical and even revolutionary. He was respected and revered by the lower castes of Tamil Nadu, but was also much reviled and abused in his lifetime. The transformation in post-Mandal/Masjid contemporary India, however, triggered a new interest in this radical thinker. Periyar's ideas are now seen as offering an alternative perspective to the dominant nationalist framework in which Indian history and society have been seen for long.

When Periyar launched Kudiarasu in May 1925 — interestingly, at a function presided over by a Saivite reformist, Gnaniar Adigal — he was still very much a part of the Congress even though he was already voicing strong views against Brahmin domination and advocating caste-based reservation in employment and education opportunities. The Vaikom Satyagraha, wherein Periyar played a leading part, was just over and the controversy around the Cheranmadevi Gurukulam (a nationalist school founded by V.V.S. Aiyar), where Brahmin students were given a privileged treatment in the serving of food, was raging. For the first time, we have started getting extensive written accounts of Periyar's views on these and other major issues, including the ones related to politics — for instance, the Simon Commission — and the vicissitudes of the Congress, Justice, and Swarajya parties.

Full report here Hindu